A Woman Entering a Taxi in the Rain

To people who are only casually interested in such matters, fashion is a bewildering phenomenon. It has been denounced as “spinach” and “a racket for selling clothes.” It constitutes, as nearly everybody knows, the third-largest industry in the country, and it is responsible for the existence of a considerable publishing business. Its interest in rapid obsolescence is transparent, and its aesthetic standards—as those who have recently been exposed to the sack, the trapeze, and the balloon will agree—are apt to shift quickly from the classic to the downright bizarre. It has attracted the attention of psychiatrists, some of whom have traced its lineage directly to the Marquis de Sade and maintain sombrely that it is largely the product of male designers suffering from a pathological fear of women and seeking to render them harmless by making them look grotesque. The doctors’ theory may very well be sound, but it leaves unexplained the fact that the women who are the victims of this curious assault on feminine charm seem to cherish their martyrdom and submit to those who impose it on them like lionesses under the lash of the tamer. The probable answer is that women don’t care about the motives of their dictators. What they are after is elegance—a quality, undefinable in terms of logic, that is quite distinct from allure. Many women possess allure almost from the cradle, but elegance is the product of deliberate art, rather than of nature; superficially, it seems to have little relation to sexual attraction—but only superficially. The outward manifestations of elegance change more or less violently from year to year, causing the masculine mind to pursue a cycle that leads from surprise to horror, from horror to resignation, from resignation to apprehension over what is coming next, and so back again to surprise, but at least elegance attracts attention, as spectacular martyrdom always does, and attention, as the late José Ortega y Gasset has pointed out, is an indispensable prelude to love. Thus, however roundabout the route, elegance does appear to have a sexual object in the end. It also takes on, in the minds of its devotees, the character of a religious ritual whose Olympus is Paris and whose principal scriptures are Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Not long ago, Mrs. Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor of the latter publication, summed up a major part of its scriptural doctrine when she remarked, “One cannot live by bread alone. One needs élan, chinchillas, jewels, and the touch of a master designer, to whom a woman is not just a woman but an illusion.”

Since the time of Charles Dana Gibson, the propagation of the illusion has rested largely in the hands of the fashion photographer, a specialist who today is the religion’s principal evangelist. For many years, this specialist entered so wholeheartedly into the advancement of the cult that he depicted the illusion pretty much as it existed in the mind’s eye of the designer, and the result was that fashion photography, as an art, tended to show a certain Byzantine aloofness from human concerns. The gaunt, skinny, praying-mantis model—an image calculated to frighten most males out of their wits—was a caricature of her sex, a fierce, denying goddess. Presumably she sold the clothes that she wore, for that was her expensive purpose, but her chic was exclusively that of the limited world of high fashion, where any suggestion of womanliness was banished as vulgar. She was as vivacious as a marble statue and as appealing as a mummy—an overt symbol of the death that all good fashion designers, according to the psychiatrists, unconsciously wish to visit on womankind.

About twelve years ago, this approach to fashion photography began to be subtly undermined by a sprightly and ingenious photographer for Harper’s Bazaar named Richard Avedon. As far as he was concerned, the statues and mummies went out the window. The model became pretty, rather than austerely aloof. She laughed, danced, skated, gambolled among herds of elephants, sang in the rain, ran breathlessly down the Champs-Elysées, smiled and sipped cognac at café tables, and otherwise gave evidence of being human. Whether she thereby sold more clothes is open to question. But the new trend certainly brightened the page of Harper’s Bazaar, and Avedon was widely conceded to have reached a previously unattained artistic level in fashion photography. A good deal of this accomplishment can be attributed to his imagination and resourcefulness in handling a camera, but some of it undoubtedly stems from the fact that his primary interest is not in fashion but in women.

The Avedon photograph—or, more broadly, the Avedon photographic style—has by now become a lively contribution to the visual poetry of sophisticated urban life. Nearly everybody is familiar with it, for it has long since overflowed the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and influenced the advertising in most of the slick-paper periodicals. It has been imitated by other photographers, but the imitations have seldom approached the animation of the originals; in any case, as soon as the imitators have mastered at least the surface elements of one of Avedon’s innovations, he has always popped up with some entirely new departure, for he has never been one to stand still. The world he depicts is an artificial one; his polished and rather romantic art flatly contradicts the bromide that the camera never lies. Avedon’s camera unquestionably lies, but it does so in such a poetic and ingratiating manner that the photographic fiction it produces has become a sort of folklore of the world in which fashionable elegance counts. The characters in this fiction are women of unbelievable beauty and grace, moving about in an environment that exists largely in the imagination. This is a composite of mists, glowing lights, the moods of nocturnal revellers, nostalgic memories of bars and gaming tables and theatres, and such ephemeral minutiae as the feeling of enchantment at the sight of a taxi in the rain whose door is opened to receive a suave and mysterious beauty, or the moment of gaiety when some lovely girl decides to throw dignity aside, or the magical second in which the casual motions of a beautiful woman are observed secretly across a restaurant table—all fragments of a metropolitan fairyland, glimpsed by ordinary mortals only at times of heightened illusion.

Technically, Avedon’s work shows little reverence for the ideals of sharpness and accuracy that are still the goal of most commercial photographers. Not being concerned with realism, Avedon sometimes deliberately reproduces the imperfections of elementary photography in order to create pictures that have an unrehearsed and improvised—almost accidental—air about them. His camera often invades a penumbral region in which the blur—for years regarded by professionals as the mark of the bungler—is used as a means of poetic evocation. His control of various kinds of blur—blurred backgrounds, blurred lighting, blurred movement by the model—has added a new dimension to what used to be an extremely literal art. The Avedon blur has, in fact, become a sort of colophon. He is not the only photographer who has intentionally produced the fuzzy effects that are the continual humiliation of the amateur, but he has been more consistent and resourceful than most. As might be imagined, the Avedon blur calls for a lot more ingenuity and technical mastery than are required for pictures that are merely clear, since it involves, among other things, determining just how much blurriness is desirable for the job at hand, and then capturing precisely that amount on the negative, working out contrasts between blurriness and sharpness in a single picture, and deciding intuitively when to blur and when not to blur.

For not all Avedon photographs are blurred, nor can blurriness even be said to be the basis of his craftsmanship. In many of his pictures, everything has been eliminated but the model, who stands out in sharp outline against an absolutely blank white background; moreover, his portraits are notable for an almost microscopic delineation of human character that reveals a stark concentration on personality. The key to Avedon’s art is to be found not in his technical devices, which he invents and discards with restless rapidity, but in his preoccupation with the looks, mannerisms, and gestures of human beings, whom he appears to regard as actors performing in dramas of his own invention. In fashion photography, the human beings are, of course, beautiful women, and as seen through his camera lens they actually do take on the semblance of leading ladies on the stage. They may, in passing, also make the clothes they are wearing seem desirable, but what principally attracts the eye is the spirited way they seem to be participating in a psychological situation. The woman inside the clothes may look joyous, wistful, lonely, arrogant, bored, expectant, surprised, annoyed—she may even weep, though weeping models have not been particularly popular with the editors of Harper’s Bazaar—but in no case does her display of emotion betray any sign of affectation. On the contrary, she invariably seems to have been caught unawares by the camera at some evanescent moment, and everything about her expression and bearing suggests a drama beginning long before and concluding long after the click of the shutter. It is this power to induce the conviction that one is witnessing a crucial instant in the emotional life of the subject, and to stimulate curiosity as to what brought it about and what will ensue, that gives the Avedon photograph its peculiar distinction—that of being not so much a picture of a well-dressed beautiful woman as a revelatory glimpse of a feminine psyche confronted with a situation involving action or passion.

Any inquiry into the nature of Avedon’s singular talent as a photographic dramatist leads, naturally, beyond the sphere of mere dexterity with a camera to a consideration of the photographer’s own personality. So slim (five feet seven and a half; a hundred and twenty-five pounds) as to give a deceptive appearance of fragility, he is a rather handsome, black-haired, dark-eyed, and, at thirty-five, still boyish-looking man—fastidious, but with no trace of self-consciousness in his manner, and endowed with an acute sensitivity to his surroundings and the people in them. Toward women—especially toward those who happen to be his models—he is courtly and attentive, and his understanding of their potentialities and foibles is comparable to that of a veteran casting director. When the model pleases him, he is so laudatory that she may well come to believe she is the embodiment of his ideal of a leading lady. In his studio—a surgically tidy suite of seven rooms on the top floor of a two-story taxpayer on East Forty-ninth Street, adjoining Manny Wolf’s Chop House—he usually works in his shirtsleeves and a pair of tight-fitting Edwardian slacks, hopping about like an undergraduate stage manager and bossing a staff of half a dozen secretaries and laboratory assistants without ever losing his temper or using an even remotely dictatorial tone. The studio is constantly throbbing with activity—props being constructed, whole stage sets being erected, complex lighting systems being laid out—and the transient fauna on the premises may include not only the models but a flock of doves or a pack of greyhounds. One cold day last winter, a portable swimming pool was installed in the place, from which a young lady emerged, dripping, to face the camera for a series of bathing-cap shots while Avedon thoughtfully provided her with restorative draughts of brandy.

No matter how frenzied the bustle, though, Avedon is never too hurried to spend half an hour (at a cost to him of perhaps sixty dollars in model’s fees) sitting serenely with a distressed model on a couch in the studio, discussing whatever it is that is troubling her. A model is likely to arise from one of Avedon’s cultivated pep talks with the idea that she really is lovely, and that, instead of merely posing, she is gloriously holding the center of an imaginary stage, free to act as her own dramatic impulses dictate. In this frame of mind she will very probably reveal the instinctive individual charm that may be expected of any beautiful girl when given her head in an aura of masculine admiration. When, presently, she finds herself facing the camera, the theatrical atmosphere is heightened not only by Avedon’s cries of delight and his occasional bantering comments, which are designed to bring about changes of mood and expression, but also by a nearby hi-fi set, playing music carefully tailored to the model’s personality and preferences. This musical accompaniment is important. Suzy Parker, Avedon’s current favorite model, for example, gets a big lift from listening to Lena Horne and to “Witchcraft” as sung by Frank Sinatra. “She needs this sort of thing,” Avedon explains. “One kind of music or another brings out the best in all of them.”

As a leading prophet of the mystique of the elegant and beautiful woman, Avedon has achieved considerable worldly success—to the extent of something like a quarter of a million dollars a year. Since, even today, Harper’s Bazaar pays him only a few hundred dollars for a full-page picture, it is plain that most of his income is derived from other sources. These are the numerous arrangements he has with advertisers, under which he celebrates such disparate products as Revlon lipstick and Pabst beer. He seldom permits his name to be used in connection with his advertising work, and he takes great care to distinguish between it and what he calls his “creative” work, which, since 1945, has appeared almost exclusively in Harper’s Bazaar, and always with a credit line. Avedon’s rise to eminence in his profession has been more in the nature of suddenly and effortlessly attaining a plateau than of painfully climbing to a peak of success, for he arrived pretty much where he is today when he was only twenty-two. He was born on May 15, 1923, in Manhattan, the descendant of a Jewish family that had migrated here from Russia two generations before. His father, who for many years was co-owner of a women’s-wear department store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, had a strong regard for the practical, and was determined to make his son appreciate the importance of being economically independent, a theme that he emphasized by repeated admonitions that if young Richard didn’t look out, he would join the army of illiterates and end up as a taxi-driver. To impress him further with the value of money, he gave the boy a weekly allowance of five cents, in pennies, payable on presentation of a budget allocating every cent of it. When Richard was twelve, or thereabouts, his father illustrated a lecture on the perils of drink by giving him a bottle of wine, which the youngster immediately polished off and which induced, first, a spirited impersonation of Fred Astaire and, later, a monumental hangover. To the best of Avedon’s recollection, he was seventeen when he left home, determined to make his way by himself and not wind up as a taxi-driver. Simultaneously, he quit De Witt Clinton High School, without graduating; except for some extension courses in literature at Columbia later on, that was the end of his formal education.

The plateau came in sight when Avedon got his first job—as an errand boy for a small photographic concern at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue—but he did not recognize it, for his ambition just then was to become a poet. He reverently studied the works of Sandburg, Yeats, Jeffers, MacLeish, and T. S. Eliot, and wrote a great many poems himself, some of which were published in the Journal-American and in H. I. Phillips’ column in the New York Sun, bringing him both a modicum of fame and—at twenty-five cents a line—an addition to his income. His published works show a certain tendency toward repetition. Having made Phillips’ column with the couplet

City snow, like sodden cotton,

Is obviously good for notton,

Avedon, not a man to waste a poetic image, a few months later used it again in this quatrain:

Summer heat, like sodden cotton,

Is obviously good for notton,

And being quite candid,

I just can’t standid.

The cause of poetry was set back by the Second World War, because in 1942 Avedon enlisted in the Merchant Marine.

During the days when his father was interested in women’s wear, Avedon had often found copies of fashion magazines lying about the house, and had even kept a scrapbook of photographs from them that he liked. At the time, he had not the slightest idea that he might someday become a photographer himself, but he was an admirer of good fashion and theatre photography, and of the pictures by Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, Martin Munkacsi, and Anton Bruehl that were then appearing in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. When he enlisted in the Merchant Marine, his father gave him a Rolleiflex camera as a going-away present, and, almost haphazardly, Avedon applied for a job in the service’s photography branch, perhaps feeling that as long as he had a camera, he might as well go in for photography. He was assigned to a group that spent most of its time on land, at Sheepshead Bay, and though he went briefly to sea a couple of times to take pictures of wrecks, most of his work consisted in turning out identification photographs of Merchant Marine personnel. On the side, and in his spare moments, he amused himself by making pictures of a more ambitious sort, some of which contained the first traces of the Avedon blur. One of these was a portrait of two brothers; the brother in the foreground was in sharp detail, and the brother in the background was out of focus, merely a suggestion of a looming presence. Avedon’s extracurricular blurry photographs were, of course, of no interest to the Merchant Marine, but he saw something in them that excited him, and in 1944, as soon as he was demobilized, he presented himself at Bonwit Teller, still in uniform, and asked to be allowed to photograph some clothes free of charge. Fashion photography at the time was by no means a difficult field to break into. Apart from a few star performers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Toni Frissell, it was peopled by some of the most commonplace hacks to be found in the photographic profession. Avedon was, and is, voluble and persuasive. He was given some clothes by the store, and, hiring Bijou Barrington (then the most expensive model in New York) with money he had saved from his Merchant Marine pay, he photographed them—unblurred. Bonwit liked the pictures, put them up in the store elevators, and gave him some other jobs. A year later, Avedon made up a portfolio of his best Bonwit work, added his Merchant Marine brothers for luck, and went around to Harper’s Bazaar. At the time, the magazine’s art director was Alexey Brodovitch, a dedicated romantic, a balletomane, and himself a dabbler in fanciful, poetically misty photography. He riffled through Avedon’s fashion shots, discarded them, and picked up the two brothers. That one interested him; he liked the blur. Accordingly, Avedon was hired, despite certain initial misgivings that Brodovitch had about the young man’s prowess as a technician, and assigned, in the beginning, to the section of the magazine known as Junior Bazaar. “His first photographs for us were technically very bad,” Brodovitch recalls. “But they were not snapshots. It has always been the shock-surprise element in his work that makes it something special. He has an amazing capacity for spotting the unusual and exciting qualities in each subject he photographs. Those first pictures of his had freshness and individuality, and they showed enthusiasm and a willingness to take chances.” Before long, the chances that Avedon took as an upstart photographer—and the graver chances that Brodovitch took in publishing his pictures—started paying off. In the thirteen years that Avedon has been at Harper’s Bazaar, working most of the time under Brodovitch’s benign and exquisitely perceptive eye, he has been permitted the full exercise of his imaginative talent, even—or perhaps especially—when that talent has led him far from the conventions of fashion-magazine photography. He has found Harper’s Bazaar a gallery in which to exhibit his most distinctive, not to say his most eccentric, gifts, and, notwithstanding the relatively trifling effect nowadays of its payments on his bank account, he still looks upon it as an unequalled showcase for an aspirant to artistic prestige.

A sense of this high-fashion prestige also affects that peculiar world inhabited by photographers’ models. The legion of photogenic beauties who make a living for the most part by ornamenting ads for soap and refrigerators regard an appearance in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue much as a singer regards an appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House. These magazines do not pay the models they hire anything like what can be earned in the advertising business. But they bestow on them a standing that is dearer than gold and that has the practical advantage of enhancing their market value no end in the profane environs of Madison Avenue, where, like Avedon, they make their financial killings. To become a Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue fashion model is to reach the peak of a crowded and highly competitive profession, a peak from which various promised lands—the theatre, the movies, marriage to a polo player—may be more or less confidently contemplated. The situation is one that has made Avedon a great power in the modelling business.

In justice to Avedon, it should be said that he exercises his power with becoming humility and concern for the standards of his profession. Although he can make a model the toast of the advertising business almost overnight—and has, in fact, repeatedly done so—his motives on such occasions have been predominantly aesthetic and have always reflected the exigencies of his approach to photography. He chooses his models not only for their beauty but for certain dramatic qualities of personality that he recognizes as suited to his particular theatrical needs. Now and then, he has detected just the right combination after only the briefest encounter with a stranger in some public place; he made one such discovery among the passengers in an elevator at De Pinna, and another while getting out of a cab in the East Fifties. But this doesn’t happen often. As a rule, Avedon selects his leading ladies from the ranks of established professionals. Once he has become interested in a girl, he sticks to her with the fidelity of a reigning diva’s impresario—applauding her triumphs, developing her most striking characteristics, and observing by the hour her personality quirks and her mannerisms, both when she is moving about and when she is in repose. Avedon, of course, has no lien on the services of a particular model; she can be hired by any photographer willing to pay her fee. Furthermore, in any given period of time he is likely to work with several models. But there is always one who, in his mind, is “his” model—the one on whom his creative thinking is centered, and on whom he can depend for complete projection of his ideas. Naturally, these girls change—in fashion, constancy is death—but Avedon tends to remain faithful to each one for a long time; when he finally feels obliged to let her go, he suffers intense pangs of regret. Several years ago, he felt so unhappy after dismissing a model that he continued to photograph her, trying to catch the sad, wistful essence of a woman forsaken in love. The mood was quite real, since there was little possibility that the model would ever again achieve the renown she had enjoyed while working for Avedon. But the photographs were not all he had hoped they might be, and in the end, with a sigh, he gave up.

Not surprisingly, the loyalty and admiration that Avedon extends to whoever is “his” model at any given time has led some of his associates to speculate on the nature of the relationship. The situation is complicated by the fact that early in his career on Harper’s Bazaar he was married to a model—Dorcas Nowell, a beautiful young thing known professionally as Doe Avedon. Nothing pleased him more than to dress her up to the nines and show her off in public. The couple were divorced after five years, however. In retrospect, some of Avedon’s friends are inclined to believe that he thought of her mainly as a lovely creation of his camera eye. Later, after consulting a psychiatrist, Avedon was quoted as saying, “I have to be a little bit in love with my models”—doubtless a true statement if “love” is taken to mean, in large measure, an emotion induced by professional delight at successfully recording the personality and charm of the woman in question on film. Pressed, not long ago, for an explanation of where he stands in this matter, Avedon thought sombrely for a while and then replied, “It’s like the feeling you have for kittens or puppies.” In any case, the issue is believed never to have ruffled the placidity of Avedon’s life with his second wife, Evvie, a highly intelligent woman, totally dissociated from the fashion world, whom he married in 1951. Avedon himself has described models in general as “a group of underdeveloped, frightened, insecure women, most of whom have been thought ugly as children—too tall and too skinny. They are all subject to trauma where their looks are concerned. You have to make them feel beautiful.” After the breakup of his first marriage, Avedon went through a long course of psychoanalysis, following which both his art and his relation to women seemed to change. Before, as a friend has remarked, he had a tendency to confuse women in general with elegant, idealized images of the species—a confusion that was evident in his early fashion photographs. Afterward, a preoccupation with the human being underneath the dress and makeup began to manifest itself immediately. Miss Parker recently expressed her admiration for him as an individual by stating simply, “He’s the most wonderful man in the business, because he realizes that models are not just coat hangers.”

Avedon’s first widely celebrated model was Dorian Leigh, a woman of somewhat subtle beauty, who became the most famous model of her time. Of all the pictures Avedon took of her, the best known was undoubtedly the one used by the Revlon nail-polish people for their Fire and Ice ad, in which she was shown standing majestically in a jewelled gown and a red cape with the fingers of one hand splayed before her face. Miss Leigh was Avedon’s reigning model from 1948 to 1951, and he wistfully remembers her as the loveliest and most versatile subject he has ever had before his camera. In the end, however, she fell in love with a wealthy, car-racing Spanish nobleman, gave up modelling, and later went into business for herself, as head of a model agency in Paris. Miss Leigh was followed by a dark-haired, formidably exotic-looking Irish-American girl named Dorothy Horan, who assumed for professional purposes the name Dovima—”Do” for “Dorothy,” “vi” for “victory,” and “ma” for her ma, to whom she was attached. Dovima, who worked for Avedon from 1951 to 1955, was a devout Catholic and—in rather startling contrast to her aspect in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, which strongly hinted that she was in the same league with Cleopatra and Salammbô—a homebody. On her trips with Avedon to make photographs on location, she was generally accompanied by a husband and invariably by an armful of comic books. Under Avedon’s supervision, she became a face and figure known throughout the world of fashion and advertising, and an image capable of disturbing masculine dreams as well as selling clothes and lipstick. She was, like all Avedon models, an instinctive actress, and entered into the business of building up a fictitious public personality as a femme fatale with a fervor that was both disarming and wholly at odds with her extremely conventional notions of conduct. To dramatize Dovima, Avedon photographed her posing in the midst of a herd of wild-eyed elephants; he took her—and her husband and a trunkload of comic books—to Paris, where she impersonated the ultimate in sophisticated elegance for his camera; noting that she bore a resemblance to the famous bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, he carted her to Egypt, where she posed for him in front of the Sphinx. Dovima was so overcome by the grandeur of her Egyptian role that she underwent a mystical experience.

“He is speaking to me,” she said softly, pointing to the Sphinx. “He is saying, ‘Dovima . . .’ ”

“How interesting that he should know your name,” remarked Avedon, trying, as always, to sound vitally attentive and inspiriting.

“He is saying, ‘Dovima, you belong here,’ ” concluded Dovima, with an air of slight annoyance at the interruption.

When she returned to the United States, a friend inquired how she had liked Africa.

“I didn’t get to Africa,” she said. “But I was in Egypt.”

“But Egypt is in Africa,” the friend pointed out.

“It is?” Dovima said. “Good Lord, if I’d known I was going to Africa, I’d have charged double.”

Dovima was succeeded by Sunny Harnett, a rather racy-looking blonde who “resembled the ideal of the luxury-drenched woman of the world, with money to throw away,” as Mrs. Vreeland has described her, adding, “She wore chinchilla and diamonds as carelessly as if they really belonged to her, and Dick had a way of making her believe that they did.” Avedon saw Miss Harnett as the epitome of sophistication; among the many dramas in which she played the leading lady, perhaps the most triumphant was set in the Casino at Le Touquet, where Avedon photographed her draped with reckless dignity over the gaming tables, looking stunningly world-weary and dangerous. After a year, Miss Harnett was, in turn, succeeded by Dorian Leigh’s younger sister, Suzy Parker, a lanky, high-spirited model whose spectacular looks and sparkling manner, besides earning her the opportunity to adorn fashion pictures and ads for Pabst beer, have recently made her a Hollywood movie star. “There is nothing to modelling,” Miss Parker has been quoted as saying. “All you do is shut off your mind and go to work.” Actually, Miss Parker does nothing of the sort. An intelligent girl and an amateur photographer herself, she is quick to visualize the dramatic ideas that Avedon works out for her, and often makes valuable suggestions of her own. Certainly no one has ever held a glass of beer aloft with more instinctive grace or with an expression of more intellectual appreciation than Miss Parker, who continually awes and delights Avedon by the endless variety of moods and movements, most of them ranging from the playful to the hilarious, that her face and body present to his camera. She recalls one instance when Avedon took a rather peremptory attitude toward her (she had protested that she looked awful that day, and he said, “It doesn’t matter how you look—it is I who make you beautiful”) but on the whole their relationship seems to be as cozy as that of a devoted brother and sister. It is conceivable that Miss Parker will shortly give up modelling to concentrate on her movie career. But so far, in spite of her Hollywood commitments, she has managed to keep working at the profession that gave her her start and in which, as the unequalled diva of the moment, she earns a hundred and twenty dollars an hour (and double that after five o’clock).

Avedon has lately had more than his accustomed share of public attention, owing to a movie called “Funny Face,” which was supposedly based on his life as a fashion photographer, and to a Bachrach advertisement that shows a camera portrait of him, wearing an immaculate business suit and looking every inch the executive, together with the message “When Richard Avedon, great fashion photographer, wants portraits for his personal use he comes to Bachrach.” Both these tributes are to some extent misleading. “Funny Face,” a musical starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, deals with a love affair between a fashion photographer and his model, and contains many photographic devices and techniques drawn from Avedon’s work—blurs, blank white backgrounds, and so on, including Dovima, Miss Harnett, and Miss Parker—but it is far afield when it comes to questions of fact. The film was made in Hollywood and Paris, and Avedon himself went both places, at a fee of ten thousand dollars, to serve as “visual consultant.” The Bachrach ad is misleading simply because, in real life, Avedon has hardly ever been seen in anything more formal than shirtsleeves, and has certainly never been taken for any sort of tycoon.

Formality is, in fact, just about the last quality that comes to mind in connection with Avedon. He may be, as many people suspect, fundamentally shrewd and calculating in his professional life, but, whether he is working or not, his manner is that of an eager youth, intensely preoccupied with those offhand, intimate forms of human communication that have been of such value to him in lulling his models into a mood of relaxed spontaneity. “I am always stimulated by people,” he says. “Almost never by ideas.” His candor about himself is so great, and so unabashedly exhibitionistic, that once, after being interviewed by a young lady from a newspaper, he sent her around to talk with his psychiatrist, to make sure that she had the whole story. He leads what might be called a functional existence, in that he chooses the way of maximum ease, casting aside the useless baggage of display by which many men seek to impress others. Until the recent growth of his studio into what shows promise of becoming a major industrial enterprise, Avedon, unlike most successful magazine photographers, always insisted on doing his own developing and printing, since some of the effects he has made his name on involve the laboratory as crucially as the lens. He has now turned the laboratory work over to a technician named Frank Finocchio, who has worked with him so long and so closely that, once he has been shown what is desired, his eye can be trusted to react like a replica of Avedon’s own.

In Paris, where Avedon and Louise Dahl-Wolfe take turns at the frantic job of photographing the semiannual collections of the big dressmaking houses for Harper’s Bazaar, he relies on a minimum, or a maximum, of equipment—at times using a Rolleiflex for an entire collection, and at other times renting generator trucks to illuminate Paris for blocks, and police to hold back the crowds. He is noted for his tireless industry on these expeditions, rising long before dawn and keeping at it until late at night, either laboring over actual pictures or experimenting with new schemes to give a novel twist to what, owing to the coverage by the daily press, will be a familiar story by the time his photographs appear. Over the years, there have been many tales about his troubles with capricious models in Paris (they made up a good deal of the plot of “Funny Face”), and most of them are true. Models do get lost and have to be tracked down through the mazes of boulevard night life; they do occasionally fall into the Seine; they do sometimes elope with wealthy playboys; and Dovima did nearly topple from the Eiffel Tower in an access of dramatic fervor. But for Avedon, crises of this kind are a desirable part of the theatrical background that he considers vital to his work. His leading lady must always be involved in a drama of some sort, and if fate fails to provide a real one, Avedon thinks one up. He often creates in his mind an entire scenario suggested by a model’s appearance. She may be a waif lost in a big and sinful city, or a titled lady pursued in Hispano-Suizas by gentlemen flourishing emeralds, or an inconsolably bored woman of the world whose heart can no longer be touched—and so on. Avedon models play scene after scene from these scripts, and sometimes help out by actually living an extra scene or two. The result is extraordinary for its realism—not the kind of realism found in most photography but the kind found in the theatre.

It might be imagined that Avedon’s surroundings, which shift from the haut monde of Paris to the no less haut world of the well-dressed American woman, would have made him into a wide-ranging man-about-town. But this is not the case. While he knows his way around the cocktail-party circuit, he has little use for the milieu except professionally, and the scenes of life there as revealed in his photographs are, to a large extent, the product of his imagination. He abhors night clubs, and attends large social functions seldom and reluctantly. In addition to his pictorial reporting on fashions for Harper’s Bazaar, he supplies the magazine with a steady stream of portraits of well-known people. On one side of his work, he is always meeting people whose names keep popping up in the gossip columns; on the other side, people whose names appear in the news and society columns. But his intimate friends are comparatively few, consisting generally of old cronies whose friendship he values even though no newspaper desk has ever heard of them. A man who rarely drinks and never smokes, Avedon lives quietly with his wife and their five-year-old son, Johnny, in a six-room apartment on Park Avenue, less than a five-minute taxi ride from his studio—quietly, that is, when Johnny, who attends the Dalton School, is not romping with a large, floppy dog named Bunky. There is nothing self-consciously aesthetic, or even especially distinctive, about the décor of the apartment, a comfortably furnished one decorated by Mrs. Avedon in conventional competition with the usual hi-fi and television sets. Mrs. Avedon, a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an attractive blonde, though by no means a spectacular glamour girl in the Avedon photographic tradition. (She has never permitted her husband to take a picture of her.) While even the authorities at Harper’s Bazaar have praised her instinctive taste in dress on formal occasions, she cares nothing about fashion, and loves to wander about the house without shoes or stockings and to dispense, rather pointedly, with the artificial glamour that plays such a conspicuous role in Avedon’s professional life. Like her husband, she is difficult to pry away from domestic privacy for big social functions; she enjoys talking seriously with persons who interest her—but preferably a few at a time—and she is quite content to spend entire evenings at home alone or with her husband. “My wife dislikes all our friends equally,” Avedon once remarked, softening the exaggeration with a smile.

Mrs. Avedon is very canny at sizing up people, and has good taste in books, music, and photography, including her husband’s, which she is perfectly ready to comment on, favorably or not, to him or to others. She is very proud of his standing in his field, goes along unobtrusively on all his Paris expeditions, and talks over each new project with him before he sets to work on it. Friends of the couple also credit her with having given the Avedon ménage much of its stability by providing a tranquil refuge for her husband, one of those dedicated men whose work is the principal—almost the exclusive—end of existence. Often working late into the night or getting up before dawn to hop in a taxi and hurry to his studio, Avedon spends nearly all his waking hours planning photographs or taking photographs or worrying about photographs. He is a distinctly urban type, to whom the thought of living in the country is appalling—as it is to his wife. Asked not long ago if he had ever considered buying a country place, he looked startled and said, “What on earth would I do with one? It would take me hours to get to my studio, and I would probably never see my wife.” The Avedons don’t own a car, because it would be a nuisance in the city and they have no desire to drive anywhere else. To both of them, the countryside—meaning the rural areas of the Temperate Zone northeast—is a bore, and they prefer to look at it, if at all, from the veranda of a hotel. They are not so critical, however, about the landscape in Jamaica, where they go every winter for a vacation; apparently, they find the tropical vistas, while not precisely urban, a little easier to take.

Though Avedon is far from desultory in bargaining with his advertising clients, he claims that his interest in money is not worldly but based solely on his concept of it as a tribute to his prestige. He appears to view his fairly princely income with some surprise. “Why, you know, I sometimes get almost as much as Picasso for a picture,” he mused recently—and this comparison of his financial success with that of an artist, rather than, say, that of a banker or an industrialist, is highly typical of his way of thinking. Like most men with a generous surplus of cash, Avedon invests in various stocks and bonds, and for advice about them he often calls on his friend Cleveland Amory, who is not only a writer but a methodical student of the market. Amory, however, is likely to be dismayed by the use that Avedon makes of his advice. Not long ago, he advised Avedon to take a cautious flyer in a certain oil stock. Avedon bought the stock, all right, and it went up even beyond Amory’s expectations, but when they next met, Avedon had forgotten all about Amory’s advice. “I just knew it would go up,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of buying any until I consulted an astrologer, and he said that my horoscope predicted good luck in oil.”

Shortly after Avedon went to work for Harper’s Bazaar, the editors of Life asked him to do a series of pictures of New York. Avedon accepted the assignment eagerly, since it seemed to promise another sudden rise in prestige, but he soon discovered that the project involved work of a kind he was not instinctively fitted for, and he never completed it. “The trouble was that when I got out into the street, I just couldn’t do it,” he says. “I didn’t like invading the privacy of perfect strangers. It seemed such an aggressive thing to do. Also, I have to control what I shoot, and I found that I couldn’t control Times Square.” The place where he could control what he wanted to shoot was, of course, his studio. “I began trying to create an out-of-focus world—a heightened reality, better than real, that suggests, rather than tells you,” he has explained. “Maybe the fact that I’m myopic had something to do with it. When I take off my glasses, especially on rainy nights, I get a far more beautiful view of the world than twenty-twenty people get. I wanted to reproduce this more poetic image that I was privately enjoying.” During Avedon’s first five years as a commercial photographer, many potential advertising clients shied away from him, because they were afraid he would portray their products bathed in an impenetrable mass of fog. But Harper’s Bazaar had steadfast faith in him. “They even ran a picture I took of the Hope Diamond in which you couldn’t see the facets,” he recalls. “What you got was the illusion of the diamond—the feeling a woman would have while wearing it.” Some Avedon admirers date the turning point in his style from a celebrated photograph he made for Harper’s Bazaar in 1950, in which Dorian Leigh was shown bursting into laughter while throwing her arms around the winner of a French bicycle race. The picture created a sensation in the profession, since embracing sports heroes and laughing had not previously been thought suitable activities for fashion models, and the extent of its influence soon became clear as models began to appear everywhere embracing bicycle riders, matadors, coachmen, and Lord knows what else, in a state of hilarity. Next, Avedon, again a good jump ahead of the pack, started photographing models with handsome young men posing as their husbands, and then—most revolutionary of all—models wheeling children in perambulators or, to make the family scene complete, dangling them in baskets gaily held by the father, too. The theme of domesticity also caught on, and has since been furthered in the philosophy of “togetherness” so relentlessly propagated by the editors of McCall’s. Avedon, though, restless as ever, already regards this accent on love and the home as an outworn fad, and is casting about for something to supersede it. “Everyone in the ads is loving everyone else,” he says dourly. “Perhaps it’s time for a shift to privacy.”

As far as Avedon’s work is concerned, there will undoubtedly be a shift of some sort, and then another and another, for he has a horror of formulas. “He never brings the same mental attitude to the same problem twice, and in fashion photography, where a certain amount of repetition is taken for granted, this is a trait that amounts to genius,” a Harper’s Bazaar editor observed a while ago. It is also a trait that Avedon deliberately cultivates. Even when his gift of improvisation fails him, he refuses to fall back on routine procedures; at least once, he has given up photography altogether for as long as six months, simply because he felt that his pictures were becoming monotonous. Notwithstanding the elaborate dramatic scenarios he invents for his models, he seldom knows just what scene in them he is going to photograph until he arrives at his studio. If nothing unexpected strikes him and he feels that he can’t lay hands on a completely original idea, he is more than likely to abandon the project. One of his few theories about photography is that if it does not provide a lot of fun for both him and his model, it is not worth bothering with, because his work will become static, methodical, and dull.

Perhaps the Harper’s Bazaar portraits that Avedon takes of celebrated people constitute his most valid claim to consideration as a serious artist. They, too, have an improvised look, and no two of them are alike in pose or treatment. Here, Avedon is under no obligation to make his subjects look elegant, and some of the portraits are almost caricatures—photographic impressions that probe for every psychological weakness and theatrical affectation in the sitter’s character. Curiously, Avedon has never had much success in attempting to photograph specimens of heroic masculinity, such as Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando. “I suppose it is because of unconscious hostility on my part, or possibly a sense of rivalry,” he says, with his customary frankness in passing along the findings of his psychiatrist. On the other hand, the ravaged face of the late Humphrey Bogart stirred him to such pity that he achieved a truly memorable portrait, one that conveys an almost pathological sense of fear. In his portrait work, Avedon appears to be inspired mainly by subjects in whom he can find qualities that excite his compassion—advanced age, physical debility, ugliness, or the pathos often underlying the surface insouciance of professional comedians or inveterate poseurs. Avedon portraits in Harper’s Bazaar have shown Frank Lloyd Wright carelessly and arrogantly wearing a day’s growth of beard, Truman Capote apparently impersonating St. Anthony, Elsa Maxwell in bed with a telephone and a pet skunk, and a head of Charles Laughton so enlarged that it looks like something seen through a microscope. None of Avedon’s subjects seem to resent this kind of treatment; most of them move in circles, both here and in Europe, where being selected to sit for one of his Harper’s Bazaar portraits ranks as an accolade.

From time to time, people watching Avedon’s smooth day-to-day performance on his secure and tranquil plateau are inclined to wonder where he can go from here. He is still a young man, and one whose restless imagination and inventiveness might be expected to urge him on to the exploration of other branches of photography. His wife, for instance, believes that he ought to devote more attention to realistic reporting, in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson. He has already, in the case of “Funny Face,” flirted with the movies, and a year or so ago he directed a television show starring Judy Garland. During the first four minutes of this production, Miss Garland carried on in stark splendor against a standard Avedon blank white background—a scene that Variety praised as an entirely new development in television—but in general the show was less enthusiastically received, and Avedon soon returned to his own snug studio, happy to be back where he could work as an individual and control the elements of his art. The answer to the question of where he goes from here may be “Nowhere.” He may already be there—if by “there” is meant a state of exuberant, tumbling transition between one photographic inspiration and the next. ♦

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